a b c d e f g Laity, Paul (10 November 2007). "The dangerous don". The Guardian. London, UK . Retrieved 16 July 2008. At 18 she sat the then-compulsory entrance exam and interview for Cambridge University, to win a place at Newnham College, a single-sex college. [7] She had considered King's, but rejected it when she learned the college did not offer scholarships to women. [7] Pagan Priests: Religion and Power in the Ancient World (as editor with John North, 1990); ISBN 0-7156-2206-4 This captivating A-Z compendium by #KateSummerscale explores the world in 99 obsessions - from spiders to clowns to all that will make your skin crawl. The usual place for a Pompeian lavatory was in the kitchen. Hygiene aside, it presumably functioned as a convenient waste-disposal unit, in addition to its more familiar function. A few had shafts that dropped down into a running water supply, though the truth is that rich Pompeians were more interested in using piped water to run ornamental fountains than to make their ablutions more efficient. Many went directly into cesspits, and the remains still lingering in them today are a favourite target of archaeologists wanting to find out what really went in and out of Pompeian stomachs.

The Fires of Vesuvius — Mary Beard | Harvard University Press The Fires of Vesuvius — Mary Beard | Harvard University Press

You may change or cancel your subscription or trial at any time online. Simply log into Settings & Account and select "Cancel" on the right-hand side. Did it feel like a timely moment to examine the nature of one-man rule, with the rise in recent years of strongman governments? Beard is a great name even for a female professor, and I mean no disrespect when I say she has a determinedly ungroomed look. But traipsing as scruffily as eccentric high donnery would permit amid the evocative ruins of Pompeii, she was the perfect teller of this engaging story, which wasn't about the volcano – or leafy hill, as they probably still thought of Vesuvius before it went off in AD79 – but the sort of people who were prematurely buried by it. There were the familiar eerie plaster casts of those captured in the drama of dying, but more telling, she said, was a recently discovered cellar of skeletons – the remains of fleeing citizens huddled here against the darkening, falling skies. You could tell a lot from bones: those of the wealthy bore the green residue of precious ornaments they had about them; here was a leg bone swollen with an infection consistent with spending too much time with possibly incontinent strangers in the surprisingly unsanitary public baths. Most astonishing, though, were the teeth of 10-year-old twins suffering from congenital syphilis, proving – Mary said with the kind of excitement most of us reserve for a good win on the scratchcards – that whoever brought syphilis to Europe, it wasn't Christopher Columbus, as previously thought (by those who think about these things). It suggested too that chronically ill children – even poor ones, without green bones – might have been cared for by a family support network, rather than, as I have always assumed, put on a mountainside to be eaten by wolves. Patterson, Christina (15 March 2015). "Mary Beard interview: 'I hadn't realised that there were people like that' ". The Independent . Retrieved 3 December 2017. I read a lot of this. I carry it everywhere. I really like Mary Beard. But I can't finish it. I'm not sure if it is the repetition of details in a different way time and again or what, because I really did enjoy it and one day I will finish it. I WILL. Pompeii and ancient Greek and Roman culture interest me a lot.Yale awards honorary degrees to 11 individuals for their achievements". YaleNews. 21 May 2019 . Retrieved 1 August 2021. Mary Beard: UC3M". UC3M. 4 September 2017 . Retrieved 14 October 2017. Mary Beard [...] will be invested as Honorary Doctor of Universidad Carlos III de Madrid (UC3M) for her important academic and professional merits...

Mary Beard: ‘The ancient world is a metaphor for us’ Mary Beard: ‘The ancient world is a metaphor for us’

Opening in 1963 New York, to Renaissance Florence, to the birth of theatre in fifth-century Athens, and the Sex Pistols shattering Thatcherite Britain - take your seat for the history of performance.She goes behind the scenes of the Great Pompeii Project, where restoration teams have gradually removed the layers of time and deterioration from the frescoes and mosaics of houses closed to the public for decades. And with the help of point-cloud scanning technology, Pompeii is seen and explained like never before. Beard’s main inquiry is to find out how the Pompeiians actually lived. For example: how they organised themselves socially, whether they lived in areas according to wealth and/or profession. In this she proves that they lived in a very mixed manner. There were no ‘quartiers’. She also looks at how the homes and shops were laid out and decorated. Even if the rooms feel rather enclosing and with small windows, Pompeiians favoured mural paintings displaying opening vistas. A fair amount of the frescoes has survived but these are now in the Archaeological Museum in Naples. This museum, like the mountain, is a strongly recommended complementary visit. In the museum shop I found a wonderful and very fat book with the paintings; it is now sitting at home waiting for my eyes and time La pittura pompeiana. In her account Beard presented the four styles of painting that span a period of close to three centuries. She also looks at finances and where the money came from and how it related to the very international commerce that was engaged in this Mediterranean port (exotic and expensive dyes from the East, the food staple ‘garum’ from Hispania and a striking 'Indian' statuette). Their politics had to be somewhat provincial since the major decisions that affected the Republic/Empire were made in Rome. Of course only men could vote but curiously several men made references to outstanding women when seeking the voters. One of the puzzles of Pompeii is where the kids went to school. No obvious school buildings or classrooms have been found. The likely answer is that teachers took their class of boys (and almost certainly only boys) to some convenient shady portico and did their teaching there. A wonderful series of paintings of scenes of life in the Forum seems to show exactly that happening – with one poor miscreant being given a nasty beating in front of his classmates. And the curriculum? To judge from the large number of quotes from Virgil’s Aeneid scrawled on Pompeian walls, the young were well drilled in the national epic. It is recommended to get closer to Vesuvius itself, so that one can try and imagine (impossible to do really) the magnitude of the explosion, since it tore open the mountain. The shape we see now is not how it was. Of course, while being near to the crater one cannot help but feeling a bit antsy, since it is an active volcano and one of the most dangerous ones, but then I have swum in the Pinatubo crater and the gods protected me. On 5 January 2019, Beard gave the sesquicentennial Public Lecture for the Society for Classical Studies, marking the 150-year anniversary of the organisation. [31] The topic of her presentation was "What do we mean by Classics now?"

The cult of Mary Beard | Mary Beard | The Guardian The cult of Mary Beard | Mary Beard | The Guardian

Sometimes, she overcompensated for her femininity. After her first baby, she decided to continue with her duties as secretary of the Cambridge Philological Society, a fortnightly faculty club where papers were presented. Her job was to read out the minutes from the last session. “I thought: I’m bloody well not going to let them say I had ratted on that obligation. Four or five days after Zoe was born, I went and read the minutes, and after a few minutes of the paper I slipped away.” For the rest of the term, she did the same: read the minutes, and discreetly slipped away to feed the baby, feeling utterly heroic. But heroism, it transpired, was not what the blokes saw. They saw a shirker. A decade later, she was in the pub with a colleague. “And he said: ‘Oh yes, you were the one who used to turn up, and then not hear the paper.’” Beard recalled: “My breasts were exploding.”Sigmund H. Danziger Jr. Memorial Lecture Series". University of Chicago. Archived from the original on 1 October 2020 . Retrieved 5 June 2018. I’d like to say yes, but I think in some ways it’s always a timely moment to think about one-man rule and the politics of corruption, dictatorship and autocracy. You can guess that it will have a relevant landing whenever you’re writing.